telligent direction in this single craft an incalculable amount of undeveloped skill has been wasted in America, and this waste has reacted more disastrously upon the general public than upon the unhired worker. The latter, for want

Courtesy of the Pratt Institute Monthly.

A NORTH CAROLINA HOUSEWIFE WEAVING COVERLETS.

of regular employment even as a common carpenter, grows accustomed to a precarious living, and drifts into a careless indifference whether he works or not. He lapses into the negligent improvidence so characteristic of the small American farmer when he is not urged to industry.

But, on the other hand, the public has grown so used to machine-made goods that it has lost nearly all sense of beauty and even of utility in furniture. The enormous quantity ground out and the cutting of prices which machinery makes possible have resulted in cheapening the product, which has degenerated into little else than veneer and varnish, in half seasoned wood and glued joinings, in simulated carvings-in everything which vitiates and debases public taste and lowers the standard of public integrity. The rising generation has no standard of value save cheapness and show. It buys an article to-day with the confessed intention of throwing it away to-mor row. This begets an ex

travagance and wastefulness that threaten to sap more than our purses. There is no article of household furnishing or supplies that is not invaded by the tawdriness, the sham and adulteration of unscrupulous but canny manufacturers who have striven to meet the demand for cheap and cheaper imitations of beauty and luxury. If any one questions the truth of this statement, let him study the bargain advertisements in the daily papers.

This severe indictment cannot be universally applied, for there are multitudes of untainted Americans who value honest workmanship and are willing to pay a living wage for it, and it is to this class the trained designer with his rural workers could appeal with confidence of gaining patronage. In many country districts where selected wood can be obtained at a minimum cost, and in a scattered population of only a few hundred inhabitants, there are at least a dozen men of average intelligence eking out a niggardly living at semi-farming and odd jobs, who if trained would be capable of reproducing Chippendale, Sheraton, or Hepplewhite furniture. They would gladly work for the most moderate wages; and this is but a pin's point on the industrial field of America.

Furniture is merely one department that invites the art worker. Miss Sibyl Carter has demonstrated that lace can be manufactured

How

profitably in Minnesota by Indian women. much more by clever Yankee girls! That American women are industrious is witnessed by the indefatigable way they crochet, embroider, and daub paint over all sorts of ridiculous things during their idle moments. Should competent women undertake to turn this misdirected energy into some original and profitable channels of lacemaking, embroidery, beadwork, woven splint or rush-work that have intrinsic value, there would be added wealth and comfort to the community. Two women have established a successful village industry at Deerfield, Mass., where orders for embroidery are executed from designs derived from old colonial examples. This furnishes profitable employment to many villagers

In North Carolina, an effort has been made to restore the hand-weaving which once prevailed among the mountain communi

coarse

ties. The chief product at present is a coverlet material which is sold for portières, couch-covers, and table-cloths, and a gray linen especially adapted for embroidery purposes. Investigation of such an enterprise shows how far-reaching the benefits are, as it enlists the labors of those who grow the flax and wool, of those who spin and dye the thread and yarn, as well as of those who actually weave the patterns.

Two other designers, one in California and one in Minnesota, have found profitable fields in leather-work, creating a market for the one thing they were best fitted to do.

Still another outlet has been

A JEWELED WALL-RUG.

self the task of elevating the hooked rug, for she saw possibilities of artistic results that their rude methods had not developed. She bought new all-wool materials, furnished original designs, dyed the goods in the warm, neutral tones seen in Oriental rugs, and trained her workers after a method of her own. The result was a complete metamorphosis of the hooked rugs, constituting a distinct departure

found for unemployed energy through the efforts of a young woman at Pequaket, N. H., in establishing the Abnakee rug industry. Urged by a desire to give employ ment to the women of that remote mountainous district, and finding they could do nothing except make the common hooked rug, which as usually executed is ugly of pattern, crude in color and unpleasant under foot, she set her

AN ABNAKEE RUG. (German Renaissance.)

in American industry, as they are unlike any product before offered. In texture they are thick and soft as the heaviest velvet carpets, and have considerable sheen; and as they are handmade they can be varied in color, pattern, or size to meet any requirement. The work speedily grew beyond the original plan of making rugs for floors. Crests and coats-of-arms upon wall-rugs are executed as well; also wallrugs with jeweled effects in the borders, portières, couch-covers, and chair-covers are made to order.

Their beauty and excellence are such that, though the enterprise is carried out in the mountains of New Hampshire, the fame of the Abnakee rug has gone abroad, and without solicitation well-known houses, one in Boston and another in Philadelphia, asked for the agency of them. This example serves to show what can be done when an experienced designer undertakes to place a primitive handicraft upon an artistic basis.

In almost every community lie germs of profitable crafts if directed by taste. That America needs cultivation in perception of both form and color is painfully evident to those who endeavor to foster these ideas among the lower classes. They not only lack artistic feeling, but they give no evidence of that creative instinct which has furnished beautiful examples of pattern and coloring found among savage and primitive races. However, many of this same class are ingenious and imitative; they are quick and intelligent to learn, and usually eager for self-cultivation. main thing to be guarded against is imitation on

The

OF

F the three natural staples on which the United States relies for her chief wealth, cotton has been bringing its producers the smallest monetary returns in proportion to the ultimate value of the product. This has not been a normal situation, nor one in which any section of the country whose interests in every part are a unit could take unqualified satisfaction. Rather it has been among the industrial problems that have fretted large-minded statesmen North, East, and West, as well as South; for, in every land, questions of State are daily becoming more entirely questions of economics.

But the solution of the difficulty appears clear at last. Let the South do with her staple what France does with the product of her silkworms, or Ireland with her flax-that is, get the utmost possible value out of it before letting it go. The cotton-growing belt seems to have waked up to the fact that its only salvation lies in becoming the cotton-manufacturing section as well.

Before the war between the States, there were but few cotton-mills in the South-so few, in fact, that they were not taken into account when the markets of the world were weighed. Indeed, there were Southern men foolish enough to look upon these manufacturing efforts as exotic in their nature-alien and out of place in a region whose vast plantations produced sufficient native wealth to need no supplementing. To them it seemed easy and natural to sell the fleecy staple at the best obtainable prices, which averaged very high at that period, and let others spin and weave it and trade in the output of the money-making but vulgar factories! This mental attitude, like the industrial situation itself, was brought about, it is plain to see, by the conditions accompanying slavery. The growth of a servile population, closely approximating in numbers that of the white proprietors had, as in all countries similarly cursed, prevented the development of the sturdy middle classes, and fostered a type of intolerance and narrowness of view among the aristocratic landholders.

Changes came, swiftly and overwhelmingly; and adjustment to the new conditions was, of necessity, slow. It required almost the space of a generation for us of the South Atlantic and Gulf States to arouse and fully grasp the truth that unaided agriculture, with an all-cotton policy, was leaving us poorer and poorer each year;

that, while the cost of raising the staple had been greatly advanced, under our altered and still unsettled system of labor, and with thousands of acres of exhausted land an incubus on our hands, yet the status of the world's markets was such that, by their manipulation, the cottongrower could be forced to sell his crops at unreasonably low figures, while on the other hand foreign manufacturers could compel him to pay fictitious prices for the fabrics made from his own raw material.

ours.

An industry in the northeastern part of our country was thriving apace with its kindred industry in England; but that upon which the New England mills depended wholly, and the English ones largely, kept declining until ruin and starvation stood in the path of the Southern farmer. Yet still the blindness lasted a little longer, for light comes slowly through such darkness as "Overproduction of cotton" was the din in our ears, even when it was easy to see this disproved by the continued high prices of the manufactured goods. But overproduction " became the watchword of many a Southern economist who bitterly accused his farming neighbor of stupidity, when he continued to plant increasing cotton crops from year to year-always deluded, it seemed, by the hope that the prices of the raw and the manufactured products were just about to be put in more equitable propor

Graniteville mills of South Carolina, and the Eagle factory of Georgia, are representative of that pioneer movement. Had the forceful preaching and example of William Gregg in 1840-46, of Converse about the same time, and their few far-sighted compeers, been promptly heeded and followed, the South would not have missed its manifest destiny all that long, dark half a century.

Spartanburg, Augusta, Columbus, were looked to; the lesson was drawn, and practical application of it made. Between 1880 and 1890 other mills sprang up in the Carolinas and Georgia-a surprising number, it appeared to the slow-wit ted, who were unprepared for any progress in this normal direction. Yet when the decade ended, we had only 1,500,000 spindles and something less than 39.000 looms-not 10 per cent., in aggregate, of New England's handsome showing! Besides, we were manufacturing only heavy yarns and coarse goods, and were still without the textile institutions which alone can assure endurance and advancement in a movement like this.

But once let such a tide set through a country inhabited by a hardy, intelligent, and progressive people, there are always vital forces to carry it onward. The few Southern factories of 1880 have now grown to be many, and the many are fast being multiplied into a host, spreading from the three States that felt the original impulse, until all of the ten are reached and revivified by it.

In the five years from 1890 to 1895,-and that they were difficult years for the country at large, no one can have forgotten, -the Cotton Belt doubled its number of spindles and looms; in the four years since that time, the maximum of 1895 has been fairly doubled again. To realize this, take Charlotte, N. C., as your center and travel about a circle whose radius is only 100 miles. Within this limited area you will find to-day over 300 mills, operating, in round num bers, 2,500,000 spindles, and nearly twice as many looms as the entire South had when the last census was taken. The major portion of

THE VICTOR STEAM-POWER MILL, CHARLOTTE, N. C.

It should be remarked, also, that while cotton factories are springing up as if by magic in cotton-fields, there is no growth of the industry in any part of the world remote from the fieldswhich may be taken to mean that, when so plain a law of fitness once begins to assert itself, it meets no challenge of right. Another point to be noted in this connection is that the section which makes about 75 per cent. of the universal cotton crop has at last claimed the prerogative of setting the price for Lancashire instead of following the reverse but unnatural rule which has prevailed from our first harvest until the pres

ent one.

The bare fact that Southern mill men paid 7 cents for cotton early in the season, when Liverpool and New York were offering 7, speaks very eloquently of a triumph that has the essential elements of an enduring gain.

The situation to-day is full of promise for the future; the long-established paradox has been overthrown; the normal is asserting its sway. An evolution through processes so natural can but proceed to happy consummation. It is esti mated that, with American labor and methods, something less than eight times the present number of spindles in the South will be needed to convert our annual harvest into yarn. At the rate of progress now maintained, the next century will still be in its first quarter when it sees every pound of cotton grown in the United States transferred direct from the gins to mills